Our Obesession over Labels

   "Will you marry me?" When Ben proposed to Emily, the audience at Theater Row's The Acorn Theater gasped in utter shock and disgruntlement. This is the last scene of the play, Straight, set in contemporary Boston and centered around Ben, an investment banker in his late twenties who has been Emily's boyfriend since they graduated from Penn. The only problem is, Ben finds himself having a crush on Chris, a twenty-something History student at Boston College, and they soon embark on a secret relationship that mires Ben in the dilemma of choosing either to embrace his sexuality or to retain the privileges of being straight.

Straight challenges the assumption that the legalization of same-sex marriage automatically announces a post-closet era. It even goes further to question the perils of the very ideas of "closet" and "coming out." "For a gay person, why is telling people your sexuality such a necessary part of that? And, if you don't, it's seen as being in the closet, and you are weak and afraid," says Ben before he and Chris have sex for the first time. "A straight person doesn't have to do that."

Ben's lament is a powerful argument on the discourse of labeling. He realizes that if he comes out, he will be quickly labeled as "Gay Ben," and his other identities will soon become secondary. Unfortunately, this issue is not only exclusive to the LGBTQ+ community. White-collar, avant-garde, loser, hippie… Our society never ceases to tag its members with unquenchable enthusiasm.

The catch is, Ben himself, on the other hand, obsesses over the prerogative of being labeled as straight. It motivates him to eventually propose to Emily despite his love for Chris. Similarly, on the discussion on the "Straight-A-sian" stereotype, such remarks often bounce back, "I don't see it's a bad stereotype," disregarding how it negates the sometimes even toxic efforts many Asian students put in their stellar work. Our subscription and submission to certain "advantageous" labels are then, another boulder that stands in the way of streaming towards a "de-hashtag" society.

Recreating the life story of the "untold" Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, this season's smash hit musical Hamilton, sweeping record-breaking 16 Tony nominations including The Best Musical, is essentially a story about the obsession over posthumous recognitions. With on-the-nose numbers titled such as "History Has Its Eyes on You" and "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story," Hamilton grapples with the binary images of historical figures, explicates characters' desire to make a name for themselves in history, and ultimately looks into the existential question: underneath all the labels, who are we? While the show is playing at the Richard Rodgers Theater in the twenty-first century, it shares the Bard's sentiments as he imagined Hamlet staring into Yorick's skull 400 years ago.

Gay, straight, questioning, white, black, yellow, brown, male, female… Who are we without labels, indeed? Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben believes that "it is only through recognition by others that man can constitute himself [or herself] as a person." Labels, after all, are for people's convenience to gauge a person. In this sense, Agamben is also suggesting that the obsession over labels is actually out of our intrinsic longing for recognition.

This year's Outer Critics Circle Award and Obie Award winner of outstanding new Off-Broadway musical, Dear Evan Hansen, puts a spin on this notion. Following the struggle of a friendless high school senior suffering from severe social anxiety, Evan Hansen, amidst the aftereffect of the suicide of another outsider teen, Connor Murphy, which Evan accidentally involves himself into, Dear Evan Hansen is a show about a misfit trying to fit into his community and building his own character. It passes the beautiful message that one has the choice to become a different person, regardless of outside expectations; the will to change is the key and is, luckily, independent of our labels. Before we know who we are, we need to first become who we are.

In this age of cultural migration, there seem to be tons of options as to what we can be. But one may need to take Dear Evan Hansen's encouragement with a grain of salt because of what we cannot. This season's revival of David Harrower's heart-wrenching play, Blackbird, depicts a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Una, confronting a middle-aged man, Ray, who has changed his name to Peter and has started a new life with a new family fifteen years after he sexually assaulted her. Towards the end of the play, the grade-school-aged daughter of Ray's new girlfriend comes to find him in his office, and it is shown that they are quite close. While Ray claims he has never had any pedophiliac feeling since Una, she and the audience senses that something is off. Doubt soon fills the house, and both parties are stuck in somewhat disbelief peppered with a deep level of unease. This projects the widely held and deeply rooted belief that some labels are life-long sentences. That people with labels such as pedophiles or criminals can and will never change.

Ray's situation echoes with the quandary that entangles Ben. Homosexuality was for a long time regarded as a sinister crime in history. It was accompanied with derogative labels such as "sodomite," "faggot," and "dyke." While same-sex marriage is legalized, traces of its ugly history still linger. "Once you are a criminal, you are a criminal through hand through." Unfortunately, once you come out, you are gay through and through.

Maybe there is still some truth to the cliché that "every cloud has a silver lining." Cultural Critic Wesley Morris looks back at 2015, what he calls "the year we obsessed over identity," and writes, "Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we've been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are." Perhaps the other side of the coin is that labels actually bring people together. They form what John Dewey calls "publics," which provide communities for people like Ben, Evan, and even Ray and common causes to fight for. The privileges that strictly pertain to certain labels are also watered down by the multitude of labels people create everyday. Perhaps every outsider can be in some ways an insider and vice versa. Perhaps "everything-hashtag" is essentially "de-hashtag."

Hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #OscarSoWhite voice what people like Ben are fighting for or against, yet ones like #TonySoDiverse and #Pride flip the coin and reveal the other side that often goes unnoticed. It shows that we have indeed made some progress in bringing people together thanks to the melding power of hashtags or labels. It suggests a possiblility that, just like a coin, when it spins, it forms a beautiful sphere that blurs the boundaries of sides or dots and lines; everything is a harmonious carbon copy, ankles clasped and limbs akimbo, dancing on the same surface.

                        WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio, David Kishik, and Stefan Pedatella. Nudities. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.

Dear Evan Hansen. By Benj Pasek & Justin Paul. Dir. Joe Mantello. Perf. Ben Platt et al. Second Stage Theatre, New York.

Blackbird. By David Harrower. Dir. Michael Greif. Perf. Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams, Sophia Anne Caruso. Belasco Theatre, New York.

Hamilton. By Lin-Manuel Miranda. Dir. Thomas Kail. Perf. Lin-Manuel Miranda et al. Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York.

Morris, Wesley. "The Year We Obsessed Over Identity." The New York Times. The New York Times, 10 Oct. 2015. Web. 11 May 2016.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Hauppauge, NY: Barron's, 2002. Print.

Straight. By Drew Fornarola & Scott Elmegreen. Dir. Andy Sandberg. Perf. Jake Epstein, Jenna Gavigan, Thomas Sullivan. The Acorn Theatre, New York.